Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Marina Warner's generously big book Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the
Arabian Nights (540 pages with illustrations) is a thoroughly researched
examination of the influence of The
Arabian Nights on western thought, beginning with its introduction of magical
imaginative stories on the so-called Age of Reason in the eighteenth century. I
read it recently because I had just read the new translation of Thousand and One Nights by Hanan
Al-Shaykh and heard Magdalene Redekop refer to
Alice Munro as a Shahrazad in a presentation at the Munro Symposium in Ottawa.

In his
review of the book in the New York Times,
Harold Bloom says that Warner "persuasively redefines The Arabian Nights as an overgrown garden of the delights and
hazards of desire." Bloom says that
one of the important things Warner does in the book is to remind us of our
"sore need for another way of knowledge," a kind of knowledge, for
want of a better term Bloom calls "literary knowledge."

I have
talked about this before in blogs on Jerome Bruner, who in his
influential 1962 book, On Knowing:
Essays for the Left Hand, argued that to understand human cognition,
one needed an approach that went beyond that provided by the conceptual tools
of the psychologist, an approach whose primary medium of exchange was the way
of the poet, for poet’s hunches and intuitions create a grammar of their
own. I also talked a bit about this last week in my
references to the philosopher Ernst Cassirer who talked about the difference
between theoretical and mythical thinking. As Bloom says about Warner, she
"shows some of the ways in which storytelling is essential to the kind of
knowledge we associate with the so-called Counter-Enlightenment.

In what follows, I will simply cite
some of the passages in Warner's book that seemed the most helpful to my own
study of the relationship between sex and storytelling in the stories of Alice
Munro, commenting briefly on their possible usefulness to me.

Warner: "The power of stories
to forge destinies has never been more memorably and sharply put as it is in this
cycle, in which the blade of the executioner's sword lies on the storyteller's
neck: the Arabian Nights present the
supreme case for storytelling because Shahrazad wins her life through her
art."

Me: Most everyone who has read Alice
Munro knows that one of her primary themes is the importance of story—that is,
recalling the past and creating narratives about it, using stories as a way to
come to terms with mysteries of human behavior and thought. She has talked about this in several
interviews, which I will pull together later, as well as in many of her
stories, which I will refer to in another blog.

Warner: "This is a literature
that intends to produce open mouths, shaken heads and inward chuckles.
Hyperbole, wild coincidence, arbitrary patterning and illogical chains of cause
and effect, all contribute."

Me: This reminded me of one of the
great short story writers of the twentieth century, Raymond Carver. Here is a
quote from an essay I did on Carver a few years ago: One of the most familiar images
of Raymond Carver recalled by his friends and acquaintances is his
participation in storytelling exchanges and his wonder at the mystery of story.
Describing Carver’s love of telling and listening to stories; Stephen Dobyns
says Carver would scratch his head and lean forward with his elbows on his
knees and say, “You know, I remember a funny thing.” And when someone else told a story, says
Dobyns, Carver would “burst forth with oddly archaic interjections like ‘you
don’t say’ and ‘think of that"’ Then he would shake his head and look
around in amazement." Tobias Wolff describes Carver’s almost
“predatory” curiosity when a story was being told, his vibrancy and
breathlessness, “as if everything depended on what you might say next. He let
his surprise show, and his enthusiasm, and his shock. “No!’ he’d cry, ‘No!’ and
‘Jesus!’ and "You don’t say!’"

Me: This notion of inviting
reflection is important to the short story, for the form began as a means of
illustrating moral lessons, which has evolved in a form that is concerned with
exploring universal themes. In both
cases, the stories do not exist merely to engage readers in a narrative, but
rather a narrative that "means" something that bears thinking about.

Warner: She reminds us that the fairytale
does not explore individual psychology or interiority.

Me: The focus in Munro's stories are
not a Jamesian exploration of interiority, of examining one's motives, but
rather the creation of characters who do things for reasons they cannot
themselves understand. There is some
mystery of motivation that denies psychological exploration.

Warner: "The arabesque
intrinsically involves a pattern efflorescing on all sides….Endlessly
generative and cyclical, arabesque embodies vitality, resourcefulness and the
dream of plenitude (no surface left bare) towards which the frame story and the
ransom tales themselves are moving…the stories themselves are
shape-shifters."

Me: One of the primary innovators of
the short story was, of course, Poe.
And Poe was a great admirer of
the "Arabesque." He even once
wrote a story about the 1002 Night. At
the Munro Symposium, Steen Heighton, a writer, notes that Munro's stories are
seldom linear and seldom merely functional.
Says her stories are like a hologram—an image fractal like, not limited
by the frame. This "dream of plenitude" in which no surface is left
bare echoes Poe's fantasy of totality, explored most fully in his long prose
poem Eureka, 'but underlying his theory of the short story in which everything is
essential to the overall unity of effect.

Warner: "The experience of
reading the stories and reflecting upon them is open-ended; surprise is an
essential trait, but as we, the audience, quickly learn that surprises must be
sprung, it becomes more difficult for the story to catch us off guard."

Me: This reminds me of the fact that
the most important point in the short story is the ending. In the O. Henry type story, the ending was a
surprise. In the Chekhov type story, it was open-ended.

Warner: She says the narrative wheel
of the book parades a variety of narrative forms: proverbial anecdotes,
riddles, lyric songs, love poems, epigrams, jokes. "There is really no rhyme or reason for
the unfolding of plots. When a motive
drives the action, envy rules. Besides
envy, lust is the principal catalyst."

Me:
Well, no question that lust is a "principal catalyst" in many
Munro stories. But lust is not a simple
matter of the physical, but rather is tangled up with the notion of adventure,
freedom, assertion of self, etc.

Warner: "The stories do not
obey internal rules about character, motive, verisimilitude or plot structure;
they do not easily fit existing theories about fiction, history or psychology."

Me: This relates to the problem of
motive in Munro's stories. It is also true that Munro's stories do not follow
the traditional rules of the short story (whatever those are). At least, many recent critics and reviewers
has suggested that her stories are not typical short stories (whatever that
is). More about this later.

Warner: "Given the intricacy of
the rules, as you lose yourself in the labyrinth, the prosody resembles
something fiendishly patterned, more terza
rime than heroic couplets."

Me: Losing yourself in the labyrinth
is always possible in the Nights. But, it is also always imminent in the
stories of Alice Munro—readers often get lost in the intricacy of the structure
of her stories.

Borges has said that all great
literature becomes children's literature.
Warner says this paradox depends on the deep universal pleasure of
storytelling for young and old: stories like those in the Arabian Nights place the audience in the position of a child, at
the mercy of the future, of life and its plots, just as the protagonists of the
Nights are subject to unknown fates,
both terrible and marvelous."
Borges has said that the greatest literature displays "reasoned
imagination."

Me: I need to examine more the implications
of Borges' notion of "reasoned imagination." For the short story often exhibits the
paradox of being a fantastic story that is meticulously controlled. See Poe for
the most important influence on this in the 19th century.

Warner: "The intricacy and
system of a woven carpet imply a strong degree of predictability; the symmetry
and recursive repetitions work like oracles: the patterns must come out in a
certain sequence, so discerning them becomes paramount but not quite
patent. It needs finesse to read a
carpet's complexities." She quotes Nabokov, who said in Speak, Memory: "I like to fold my
magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the
pattern upon another."(p. 125)

Me: I like this. It not only reminds me of Henry James' story
"The Figure in the Carpet," but, more generally, it reminds me of the
intricacy of the short story form that requires a careful close reading, for
the short story always works more as a language pattern than merely a temporal
plot.

Warner: "The Nights inspires a way of thinking ab out
writing and the making of literature as forms of exchange across time—dream journeys
in which the maker fuses with what is being made, until the artefact exercises
in return its own fashioning force. Both
of these principles draw away from the prevalent idea of art as mimesis,
representing the world in a persuasive, true-to-life way, and emphasize instead
the agency of literature. Stories need
not report on real life, but learn the way to changing the experience of living
it." p. 29.

Me: This is a key passage in the
book for me, especially the notion that the principles of the stories in Nights draw away from the idea of art as
mimesis and move more toward the idea of
art as being self-reflexive. If you take
a look at the history of criticism of Munro's stories, you will notice that
early critics focused on her stories as simple realism. Later critics have tended to focus more on
their structural artifice.

Warner: Talking about Giambattista
Basile, Italo Calvino says: "A reading in which metaphors, rather than
being considered an ornament that adorns the fundamental interweaving of plot,
subplots and narrative functions, move them forward into the foreground, as the
true substance of the text, bordered by the decorative arabesque threadwork of
fabulous vicissitudes," the weaver conjugates structural motifs in
infinite combinations within a basic structure of frame, ground and figure, and
then inflects each one differently through variations of color, dimensions,
quality of material.

Me: This is good, for it emphasizes
that metaphor is the very heart of the story, that metaphor is constructive,
constitutive not merely ornament.
William Gass talks about this as "model-building" and Walker
Percy talks about the constructive process of metaphor as mistake. The notion
of the story as being like a carpet woven of various motifs to create a
meaningful pattern is crucial.

Me: This echoes my frequent
observation that motivation in Munro stories is always ultimately mysterious,
driven by the demands of the pattern and the story.

Warner: She says some of the marks
of oral storytelling are: multiple reprises and repetitions, doublings of characters,
generations and incidents."

Me: Yes, I see this in oral
storytelling; it aids the memory process for the teller. But it also carries on in the written story
as well. I wonder why.

Warner: "The dream quality of
the Nights depends on a feature of
the storytelling mode itself, more fundamental than its optical magic. When the stories use language to institute
impossible realities, images become reality and metaphors' status is dissolved
so that any referent becomes fact. This
mental slippage, turning the figurative into the literal, is typical of the
dreaming mind, which happily—and often amusingly—makes puns, especially on
homonyms and proper names."

Me: This notion of images becoming
reality and the figurative becoming the literal reverses our naïve assumption
that story is mimetic. Instead of the story
imitating reality, reality imitates story.
Need to refer back to Oscar Wilde's famous discussion of this in
"The Decay of Lying." Why is
it important to a study of Munro's stories? Because it reverses the naïve assumption
that her stories are mimetic with realistic plots and real characters.

Warner: "The inner life of characters
in the Nights flows into their outer
circumstances without resistance, and it is not always clear what is dream and
what is not. What you dream looks ahead:
perhaps the pattern of all things lying ahead has been set and can be descried
in the right conditions." She says Proust aspired to the dream-like
qualities of Nights.

Me: We like to think that we can
easily distinguish between dream and reality; really, all it takes is a pinch,
right to wake us up to reality—as if reality were as certain and secure as all
that. I think Munro's stories depend
more on dream than many critics have believed.

Warner: She says Borges' Circular Ruins is an allegory of writing;
it "demonstrates how imagination at work in literature forges the
impossible through language and opens up meanings to depths beyond sense: the
not-sense that magic unfolds." She talks about magic in Nights in which common artefacts are
ages of wonders and riches—the marvelous in the banal. "Magic in the
stories is by definition capable of imbuing lifeless things with vitality,
which often endows single objects with power to affect the group and the whole
society—the collective as well as the personal." Hugo van Hofmannsthal
once asked, "Where is depth to be found? And answered, On the
surface." She discusses the "slippage between object and metaphor, as
occurs in the case of talismans and other magical devices in the Nights, where the literal materiality of
a thing dissolves into the virtual reality of its powers."

Me: This reminds
me of one of Raymond Carver's comments that I have quoted before: "It's
possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and
objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things--a
chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring--with immense, even
startling power."

Warner: "Observation,
imaginative projection and interpretation transform objects of attention and
can stimulate them to move and utter—subjectively." . She refers to Jonathan Lamb's book, The Evolution of Sympathy. Lamb uses the
term realism to characterize the ability to be as if "I were you." She says Hans Christian Andersen was the
write most influential in adopting techniques of sympathy from the Nights. Warner: She says that
Coleridge's "Suspension of disbelief" is related to the notion of
sympathy through identification.

Me: This ability to take oneself out
of the self and project into the other is related to "Theory of Mind"
that I have discussed in an earlier blog. See also Cassier on mythic thinking,
and Eliade on sacred transformation.

Warner: "Lyric combines words
and music to create a tempo that readers and listeners experience physically,
as in dancing; poetry here struggles to free itself from constraints of
reference and meaning, to reach a wordless state of transport (even of
self-annihilation."

Me: Since the short story is more
closely aligned with poetry than with novel, there is something in the form of
this need to break free of the constraints of reference—using language to transcend language.

Warner: She talks about Freud's
couch: "The relation between couch, confession, erotics, daydreaming and
storytelling reverberates wonderfully in the figure of the most famous daybed
in modern culture, and a prime site of modern fantasy, the couch which Sigmund
Freud covered with oriental rugs and cushions."

Me: This is the oriental rug motif
again--the figure in the carpet, the notion of the story consisting of
interrelated patterns of language that create a form that in itself has
meaning.

This has gone on so long, but Stranger Magic is, after all a long
book, and, as it is, I have only modestly raided it for material that I think
might be helpful. There is much more in
Warner's book than I have been able to suggest.
But I am in a hurry now to get to the stories. As always, for me, it is the story that must
dominate my discussion, not the historical or theoretical context that I might
use to ground that discussion.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

I was going to simply leave a link here to my new blog with my short stories, but I actually read this post and thought it was very thoughtful. There's certainly a lot to be said, in particular, about the influence of arabesque imagery in many classic Western short stories. Thank you.

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About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."